KMC tender submission box broken open

In an unprecedented incident, a gang of 30-40 people broke open a car parking lot tender submission box at the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) headquarters building on Tuesday afternoon.

According to the KMC officials attached with the car parking and advertisement department, a gang entered the hall at around 2 pm pretending to submit tender papers but instead damaged and broke open the box in front of the civic staff.

“It is an unfortunate incident. I have already ordered a probe and an FIR has been lodged with the New Market Police Station,” city mayor Sovan Chaterjee said.

According to the KMC officials, Tuesday was the last day for submission of tender papers for 20 ‘day time’ parking lots and 9 ‘night hour’ parking lots within the KMC area.

“There are chances of some of the tender papers missing from the damaged tender submission box and thus we have decided to extend the submission date,” Chatterjee said.

Stating that only the registered cooperatives were allowed to participate in the tender process, the police seized the box and handed over the tender envelops to the KMC department.

According to a senior KMC official, this was a re-tendering process after the earlier one got cancelled because only two cooperatives had submitted the tender papers when the rule says a minimum of three needs to make the process legal.

“The conflicts among different car parking cooperatives resulted in such an unprecedented incident,” a highly placed civic official said.

Some of the car parking stretches for which KMC had invited tenders, which includes both vacant stretches and newly allowed stretches by Kolkata Police include Jawaharlal Nehru Road from SN Banerjee crossing to Esplanade Metro Station, AJC Bose Road from Pratt Memorial to Shakespeare Sarani crossing, Short Street, Sarat Chatterjee Avenue, Nirmal Chandra Street etc.